Animals vs. Video Game Bosses

to the task of defeating the final boss? Or could he use some fishy friends and could have mycologists take down the batties from the most recent Resident Evil game? Discover the more as we answered the angel question. Parasitic Pod Got your Tongue? Joining me today is the creator of the wildly popular YouTube channel that translates real life animal biology into video game term Patch from tears Zoo. Welcome, Hi, thanks so much for having me. I am very excited

to have you on for this episode. I think your videos are wildly entertaining. They're really cool. I love I don't think it's a secret at this point that I'm a nerd kind of in every aspect of my life. I love video games, I love animals. I really love sort of I don't want to say gamification because I don't like that word, but taking sort of animal biology and putting it into terms that people who love video

games can really understand. Oh, thank you so much. I'm really excited to rank some video game bosses versus animals VideA so uh first, I mean, we've got to go with maybe the most iconic boss of all time. I don't want to put any video game bosses on blast here, but I think Bowser to makes it right. King Koopa Bowser is definitely a big bad that everyone knows. I think, yeah, yeah. The Mario games feature Bowser as the main antagonist. He's

that big, spiky turtle like fellow. He's King of the Kopas, which I guess is what those little turtles are. I only discovered that into my adult life. I just thought they were turtles that you jump on. But yeah, he frequently captures Princess Peach, and his life goals are to defeat Mario, become the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom, and maybe go on a date with Princess Peach, which seems

counterintuitive to the whole kidnappy thing. But you know, I agree, maybe not the best way to go about it, and I think some of the recent Mario games have kind of addressed that. Um but yeah, Pawser definitely a legend, right, a legend, just not in the dating sphere, so perhaps not. Some of Moser's strengths are that he spits fire pretty good. It's a pretty good that's a strong ability for sure. Yeah,

he's spiky. He got a lot of spikes, which you know, we know is a good defense mechanism or a variety of animals. Uh, he's got horns and claws and that that's good. That definitely helps him out. And he's big and strong. Yes, he's got a serious size advantage over most of his foes. Yes, Mario, Yeah, Mario is kind of a he's a compact Italian plumber. He's a short he's a short king. Yeah. Uh, he's you know what he does lacks in size, he makes up in I

guess stomping ability, right, that's his main power. Stomping, Yeah, stomping and jumping. Yep, he's breaking next, jumping on people's heads. We love a short Italian plumber king who step on your neck? So, uh, Bowser's weaknesses is uh, well, there's his unrequited, unhealthy infatuation with princesses, which you know, that's more of a psychological thing. You know, maybe he could get under his skin with some some comments about you know, he's uh, he doesn't know how to how to talk

to women. But other than that, his weakness is I think poor agility and flexibility. And he has this spot open on his tail that in Super Mario sixty four you must grab that tail and spin him around to defeat him. Based on these specifications, I think we're looking for a sturdy animal or a very agile animal that can outmaneuver him um, and something that can attack its praise tails, maybe do spin attacks, maybe some brute strength.

What do you think? Yeah, I mean my mind kind of goes to the sorts of animals that um are the predators of turtles, because Bosser is basically a dragon turtle. And I'm thinking, like, I don't know, birds, Like there's some birds that prey on turtles by like carrying them up into the air. Yeah. I love that really big

bird to do that. I love it. I love it when birds of prey, just like it's such a it's so devious to pick up your prey and you're not doing anything to them yet, but you're just taking them higher and higher to drop down. Exactly, you're letting you're abusing the physics of real life. You know, you're letting gravity do the dirty work for you. Exactly. It's super intelligent. It's genius. Uh, you know, works smart, not harder, right, um,

murder smarter, not harder, precisely. But I don't think we're going to find any birds that can quite do that to Bowser. Maybe not, maybe not, but you know there are animals. So one thing I was looking for is strong grip, right, because you need you're gonna need a strong grip because once you've got Bowser's tail, it's the game's over. Right, You've got his tail he can't get.

That's one of the things is even though Mario is teeny tiny, like he can't turn around, because when Mario is attached to his tail, what's he gonna do like burn his own tail off? No? Yeah, so are you thinking like crocodiles. Crocodiles is a very good one. Like if a croc bid a Bowser's tail for sure that Bowser would be in a tough, tough spot, pretty hard to get the crocodile off of you. At that point, I think, Yeah, So with crocodile, I think you would

not have to make any modifications. You could just take a classic saltwater crocodile pitted against Bowser, and in my opinion, the crocodile would win every time. What do you think, I think, especially because if Bowser decides to use his firebreath attack, the crocodile could just like submerge itself under the water. Absolutely, I guess in this hypothetical scenario, the croc has to also have water around it, and for whatever reason, wading through some swamp or river or something,

there are water levels and Mario, right, there's lots of water. Yeah, definitely water levels. It's definitely water levels. So yeah, let's let's talk a little bit more about crocodiles because this is actually one of my picks for who I think could defeat Bowser. So, crocodiles are large reptiles found in

aquatic environments all around the world. Most species of crocodile employ a devastating attack against their victims called a death roll, which I think would be a particularly effective attack against a bowser. So the death roll is the crocodile's way of attacking and devouring prey many times its size, such as a will the Beast, which is not an easy

thing to eat. I think even you imagine, like crocodiles are pretty big, but imagine trying to get like a will the Beast all in your mouth all at once. It's impossible. You've never you've never tried to chug a will the Beast. I can't say that I have you No. I think the closest I've gotten is like trying to get a whole in and out burger, like half of it in my mouth and one by kind of really one by challenging. Awesome. I've done that with like donuts.

I don't think I've done with a burger. Yeah, it doesn't work very good with a burger, But I was really trying, like a guy Fieri bye with the burger one bite challenge and then may I respect it? Yep. The greets are for later. That's a problem for a future Katie, right That's for future Katie right now. It's in and out Katie time. But for a crocodile, that's a real problem. Crocodiles don't really chew their food, do they. They don't. They don't have the chewing muscles that other carnivores.

They can't rip and tear. They don't have the grinding action that like omnivores like humans have, like we can grind exactly. Yeah. I think if anything, the crocodile would probably rip off Bowser's tail by doing the whole death roll thing. It would really have much other options to actually eat Bowser. So much of him is inside that shell, which I don't think the crocod would be really able

to do much to even with its powerful bite. I mean, just because it's like a sphere, like imagine trying to bite something round like that, he'd have to hollow out Bowser from the inside, like get in there and pull the flesh chunks out from inside that shell. I suppose is that that could definitely work. Pretty grizzly looking life videos yeah, yeah, Like Hyena is getting all up in like a hip elephant after killing it. David Attenborrow narrating as you see, like like a hyena just come out

of a crevice of Bowser's eyehole. I sack it, but yeah. So, because the crocodile doesn't chew it's prey to break it down into smaller pieces. Whatever it swallows, it has to swallow whole. For smaller prey, that's easy enough. It just chomps down, crushes it, and gulps it back like an

in and out burger um. And often for bigger prey, the crocodile will actually drown its prey first, because you know, dead, drowned prey is easier to deal with than a kicking, live prey that's going, hey, wait a minute, I didn't sign up for this. So it's jaws are great for gripping, bad for chewing. In fact, it's jaw strength has a bite force of over sixteen thousand Newton's, which I you know, that's just a number, right, Like, it's hard to put

into perspective of what that is. But for comparison, a human grip is about three hundred Newton's, so you know it's pretty good. Yeah. It's why when you put your hand inside a crocodile mouth, it's usually not going to go good for you. It's just not Do not recommend that, do not recommend. I did find a video when I was researching this that I won't describe too much because I don't want people googling it. But it's bad. Don't put your hand in a crocodile mouth. People, don't do it.

If you want your hand back, yeah, don't don't put it there if you're not offering your hand literally to the crocodile to take for keeps. These don't do it. So it will bite down, clamp down on its prey and then do this death roll so where it just spin, spin, spin,

like a video game attack. It's an incredible like because they're in the water, they have some buoyancy, some more I guess agility than you would think such a large reptile would have, and they just spit around like a tornado with that limb in their mouth and literally will twist it right off of the body of their prey. And uh so they are able to then disassemble something like a will the Beast or maybe like a bowser chunk by chunk, such that they can just eat something

much larger than itself. It would certainly be a pretty gruesome sight to watch. Yeah, I think they could eventually take apart at least things that are outside of the shell they could probably rip Bowser's limbs off, which is a lot. Yeah, his tail, his feet and arms ahead those cute little like goth bracelets that he's got, He's got a lot of points of contact outside of the shell. I think. Yeah, that's true. And in fact, the death roll hasn't always been used by crocodiles to tear prey

up into little edible bits. It's actually thought to be a defensive combat move that they can also use to tear down prey. So there have been observations of crocodiles using this move when they're fighting some kind of aggressive other animal or other crocodiles. So it's totally totally feasible that a crocodile would use this move on Bowser and a one on one fight. Definitely, I think given its home turf of a river swamp, I think a crocodile has a would pose a pretty big threat to Bowser

for sure. Yes, yes, I agree, And but that is maybe not the only animal that I think could take down Bowser. Now, uh, let's say, isn't there a there's a thing that Mario can eat right in the game, one of the mushrooms that makes him real big? Yeah? There's one that makes him big. There's a few other power ups that give him uh the ability to kind of fly or um shoot fire himself. But the big

one is the most iconic for sure. That's like this, that's like the Ghost Pepper, the Ghost Pepper mushroom story. He just he just shoots it out of his his hands are his face, I see not a well. Anyways, if you gave a mere cat one of those mushrooms, that makes it real big. I think that Bowser would be complete toast because if Bowser's point of weakness is grabbing an attack the tail, mirror cats are just designed to fight dirty uh and grab you by the butt.

So mere cats are a species of social mongoose found in southern Africa. You know, they're to mown from the Lion King. Completely accurate depiction. They all have Nathan Lane's voice, so they love to eat scorpions when given the opportunity. Uh. Now, I've seen a lot of conjecture that like, mongooses are sorry, mere cats are, well, your cats are mongooses. But nevertheless, mere cats that they're immune to venom or two poison.

They have some resistance to venom and poison, which are venom and toxins, which is good because they do like to eat snakes and scorpions, but they're they're not completely immune. They could not survive being stabbed a bunch of times by a highly venomous scorpion, and they don't want to eat it. You know. It's just it's a bad time for for the little mercat that wants to eat a highly toxic arthur pods. So instead, what they do is, when they want to eat a scorpion, they attack it

from the butt side. They grab it by the stinger, rip off its entire backside, including the stinger. They discard the stinger, and then just rub the poor little scorpion in the sand until it washes away all the toxins, uh, and then they can enjoy this tasty snack. So, in my opinion, the fact that meercats learned to do this like since their babies means that if you scaled up a meercat you gave it one of those dubious magic mushrooms and it was fighting size with bowser, it would

just gruesomely destroy and devour our bowser. Yeah. Definitely, the agility that mere cats possesses pretty tough to beat now. I mean there's a little bit of uh asterisk next to the whole like if you make it bigger because you run into like the square cube law everything whether or not you can retain that agility, right, But it's vascular system just sort of uh immediately collapse under the weight of its new girth. Would it you know? Yeah? And the whole moment of a nerve show of having

limbs that are way longer snap. Would it not get enough oxygen? Yeah, there's a lot of questions when you scale things up. We can ignore all of that if you need to be just to talk about giant mere cats. So in your scenario, are the mere cats because you said that there very social animals and that's oftentimes how they hunt snakes and everything. So in the scenario, is it just one mere cat versus Bowser, a giant meer cat,

or is it the whole posse of mere cats? If I think it's either or right to defeat Bowser, you could either have one giant mere cat or an army of regular size mere cats because together they're very good at teaming, Like they can take on a king cobra

together as a unit, which is very impressive. Now, they don't often fight uh cobras, which there's always something a little bit suspect to me when you see wildlife footage of like mirr cats fighting a cobra, because like, they don't usually get into conflict, Like did someone just throw a cobra at them? And the way to find the most dangerous things they possibly can? Yeah, yeah, and like sort of staging something for uh for dramatic television effect. Nevertheless,

they do. They do team up and fight snakes by forming a united front as a team because they are highly social. So I think a team of merecats could do it, or one giant meercat uh. And my last contender maybe is something you wouldn't necessarily think of, but it has pound for pound an incredibly strong grip, one of the strongest grips in the world. It is the coconut crab. So the coconut crab is a large, large terrestrial crustacean found on islands and coasts in the Indian

Ocean and parts of the Pacific Ocean. They look like a weird big crab. They're actually more closely related to hermit crabs than actual crabs. Have you heard of carsonization? I certainly have considered making a video on the subject. Oh you must, I mean it is inevitable. We all shall become crabs one day. Carsonization is the term for where they repeated parallel or convergent evolution of Arthur pods into crab form, which apparently is the most desirable of

forms in all of nature, is to be crab. So yeah, I've started scuttling just in preparation for the future. Go yeah, but yeah, So the coconut crab not really a crab, more of a hermit crab. It is a crustacean. They're huge. The fact that they are so big and live on land is a little bit disconcerting. They can weigh up to nine pounds or four kims and grow up to three ft or one meter in length. So intimidating. I'm intimidated. I wouldn't want to mess with one. No, no, thank you. Yeah,

So researchers, God bless our natural biology researchers. They collected about thirty coconut crab us and measured their pinches with They look like these metal tubes that the coconut crabs would pinch, and then it would measure the force of those big pinches, and they found that they were able to pinch with the force of over one thousand, seven hundred newtons. So again, human grip only three hundred Newton's coconut crab the size that it is, can grip at

almost six times that of a human. And so if you scaled a coconut crab up to the size of say an average size maybe a little bit short human plumber, he could grip with six tons of force. Yeah, I think that might be enough to do a number on bows of shell. I think so. I think he could not only could he grab the tail and toss bowser like a limp rag, he could just crack open that

shell like a little pistachio. So that's like the whole reason they're called coconut crabs, right, is because they could shatter coconuts with their just the sheer force of their grip. You know, I've never even questioned their name, but that sounds right to me. I totally made that up, totally wrong, I believe sounds right. It sounds right to me as well.

I believe you. So. One of the researchers marine biologists, shin Ichiro Coca, was pinched by one of the test subject coconut crabs and said quote, While it was only a few minutes, I felt eternal Hell, thank you. I would not want to be him, no, no brave souls to invite a bunch of coconut crabs over to test their pinches. Uh. Yeah, so actually I was just in Costa Rica and even picking up little little harmy crabs

on the beach. Yeah. I would get a little nervous if I grabbed, like a particularly big one and they would try to it. It can hurt, It can hurt bad. So imagine one that's two thousand times as big. Thank you you had one as well. I had a little tiny hermit crab as a kid, even though they don't really make good pets, but I was a kid. I don't know, uh, and it it's favorite thing to do. Probably it was looking for a different shell than the one that I had provided to it. Thought it was lame,

not the right size, which is a tricky thing. If you have a hermit crab pet, you need to provide it with many different shells because it gets bigger and needs to pick out a new shell. It's gonna be picky. So I think, oh, like this one is a good size for it, not according to it. So it would crawl in my armpit and like pinch really hard in there because I think it was like trying out my body as a new shell, like testing the structural integrity of my armpit. But that hurts, So I can't imagine

one thousand, seven hundred Newton's of force, which yowser's that. Yeah, quite a strong handshake, Yeah, leave a mark for sure. You know those competitive business handshakes. Yes, like basically the kind of handshake that your girlfriend's dad gives you the first time. Give me that kind of thing. Yeah, yes, college your sport grabbed your hand device like grip just so you know, just so you know the pecking order. Don't date a coconut crab because a coconut crab dad

could just crush your hand into a pulverized smoosh. Absolutely alright. So our next video game boss is the Vortex Queen from Echo the Dolphin. Now this is maybe not as well known of a boss, but I I had to include it because this is one of the times when a video game boss is actually defeated by an animal, and I want to question the choice of protagonists in

this video game. So Echo the Dolphin was Sega Genesis adventure game featuring Echo the Dolphin, who is a dolphin that jumps real good and is on an adventure to find it's missing pod of dolphins. So I actually did not play this game as a kid because I didn't have the Sega Genesis. I've never played it at all, but I might have to see if I can find an emulator for it, because it sounds very unique. It is, I read I went down out of fandom wicky hole

on this one, and it's an interesting plot. I mean like when I saw artwork for this game, was like, yes, about dolphin who jumps real good, but it's got aliens and time travel in it. Oh good, Okay, yeah every game needs that. So there are in this game your pod goes missing, your pot of dolphins. They're all these weird weather phenomenons like sudden storms and water spouts, which turn out to be the fault of an alien race

of parasites known as the Vortex. So Echo the Dolphin must travel through time to collect powerful orbs to help defeat the Vortex Queen and rescue the planet and Echoes pod of dolphins. So the Vortex Queen is a giant alien head that lives in the deep sea with anglerfish like jaws and huge black eyes. She attacks her enemies by using strong suction to pull creatures into her mouth

and devours them instantly. She can summon vortex jellyfish and Vortex drones to attack the player, all the while trying to suck you right into her mouth. So you defeat the Vortex Queen Echo almost first destroy her eyes with sonar and then break off her jaw and then break her skull. WHOA, that's so violent. Yeah, I mean for a fun game about dolphins, it's a pretty violent and pretty uh, pretty intense, Like this Vortex Queen. The pixel

art of it it's bonkers. It's like it does look like a terrifying deep sea creature kind of fused with like an alien skull, which is definitely not probably what the mini thousands of grandmas who picked this game out for their kids like thought was going to be. And this is about just jump in and swim in and killing alien giant heads down deep in the sea, you know,

standard marine fun times. So the issue I have with this, I mean they try to explain away some of the things with Echo the dolphins like time travels and picks up magic orbs so that he can breathe underwater without Because dolphins are mammals, they got to breathe sometimes, so they can't unlike maybe some larger cetaceans like a sperm whale or a blue whale. They really can't go that deep and spin that much time, uh, deep down without

surfacing to breathe. Um, so Echo really shouldn't be down there. Uh. They try to explain it away with magic, but that's not good enough for me. Also, uh, dolphins. Sonar is not a weapon. It is a sensory tool. It uses clicks to bounce sound off objects and form a map of their surroundings. These clicks don't do anything really to harm other animals unless it confuses some other cetacean that

is also trying to find. As far as weapons go, uh, there are much more day sonic blasts in the animal kingdom, like even even just like the shriek of a parrot I think is potentially almost as loud as like a gunshot, and that can definitely mess with your ears if you're too close, or the pinch of a mantis peacock mantis shrimp is going to be Yeah, not really a sonic weapon, but it's definitely yeah exactly, but no, yeah, the sonar

doesn't really do anything. This is very hyped up sort of Havanas syndrome masque a situation with that kind of dolphin really promising much more of a sonic weapon then, and dolphin can really do uh So, in my opinion, dolphin is not really the best animal for the job, even a magic time traveling dolphin. Of course, dolphins have a lot of strength that I should not downplay. Like, they're intelligent, they're great at teamwork, very strong abs. Have

you ever seen the abs of a dolphin? I can't say that I have no. I mean, but I guess if you're doing all that, yeah, like you're basically just doing crunches in order to move. Yeah, it's Jim goals. It's up on my Gim goals board. I want to have the abs of a dolphin. They are agile and in groups of dolphins, they are capable of forming bubble nuts and sand nets, which would be very useful for

trying to defeat an alien queen. Unfortunately, within the context of the story, uh echoes, dolphin buddies have been kidnapped by the aliens, so right, And so my thinking is that Echo is gonna need to get a team together and think outside of his dolphin group and find like a marine team of creepy ocean critters where you have like a cool montage of Echo going around to all these different marine animals and they're like, goddamn it, I'm in, and then they play some music and they get in

like a submarine van thing, and yeah, right, So the team needs to be able to defeat the Vortex Queen in the three stages that the player needs to defeat the Vortex Queen has to attack the eyes, the mouth, and in the skull. So and to be able to deal with all the little means, right, all the little Vortex Queen was summoning like jellyfish. So I was thinking, if it's got to deal with jellyfish, maybe a marine turtle,

a sea turtle, pretty good for that. The jellyfish maybe clear the way because they eat jellyfish, right exactly, And so I mean in order to even get to the to the final boss, right, you wouldn't want to be swimming through jellyfish and take a whole bunch of stings and die from poison before you even have the chance. Yeah, exactly, So you got you got your turtle squad who clears out dominions the perfect and then you need something to attack the eyes. I'm thinking for that the Copa pod

omata Koita elongata. Have you heard of this? No? Is this like that's like a really really microscopic station, right, it's they can be microscopic, so they can be zooplankton, and sometimes they can be larger such that they're visible with the naked eye, usually under about an inch still very small, Okay, several tiny, real tiny, but coupe pods are a class of crustaceans, and like you said, they're

often really tiny, like zooplankton size. But this one, the o elongatta, is little like warm size, like under an inch long, little pink um. They're kind of a weird y shape. They look like a worm that has two little noodle legs. It's actually kind of funny. And they are parasites that attach themselves to the eyes of their host, feeding on their eye tissue and impairing their vision. That's horrible.

That would not want to be that thing's victim. It's typical host is one of the largest and oldest living sharks, the greenland shark. So yeah, you know these like half a millennia basically four exactly, Yes, ancient ancients, So they'd give like the Vortex Queen a run for her money in terms of, you know, old creatures that lurk in the water. I feel like you could also go for like a swordfish or a marlin or something. Oh yeah, just to poke the eyes out, pokemon the eye if

she needs to do. That's a much more straight Yeah, that's a much more straight forward method. I feel like it might get the dove chopped on a little quicker ifs parasites take a little while to start shop and destroy eye tissue. On the other hand, is it as fun though, like to slowly you know, like plant those months in advance, Like you could have a spy montage of these little copa pods getting in there. Uh, you definitely could. You're a little bit you're a little less

devious than I am. I think you're just like, we go in, we scoop its eyes out with a swordfish, we go out. Yeah. So there are some theories actually that the copa pod in the greenland shark actually have a mutualistic relationship rather than a parasitic one. Oh, so you think it would betray the team. It's possible the copa pod actually emits a or at least the theory.

I'm not sure exactly how much of this has proven um, but they may emit a slight level of bioluminescence, and so the idea is, well, the greenland shark doesn't really use its eyes much to hunt in the first place, so it could use this bioluminescence of these copa pods to draw fish closer to it and then ambush, using its sense of smell to ambush these fish and eat them.

That's a theory. It's quite a trade off. I don't know if I could make that deal, have your have your weird living eyeball tassels in exchange for slightly easier meals. I don't know. Maybe maybe I do it. That's a tough call. I guess I wasn't using like you said, yeah, like they use their sense of smell. Uh, it does feel like it'd be like kind of annoying, Like it always feels like you have something in your eye because you do exactly. I always get eyelashes in my eye.

So I can't imagine a crustacean hanging on. I hate eyeball stuff. I hate looking at things like I can't I have a glasses prescription, and people like, well, why don't you wear contacts? It's like no, never, let's touch your eye every time you want to take you out. Yeah, no, no, no, those little petrie discs that you put on their waiting for some kind of voracious bacteria to grow, and there no,

thank you. So either with a swordfish poking the eyeball out or the copa pods slowly but surely devouring the vortex Queen's vision. Let's say we've taken out her eyes, next stage is taking out her mouth. Now, Echo does this by I guess, dismantling her jaw with sonar, which we've established is not really how sonar works. You're really really strong, yeah, last of sonic energy to break a bone, Yeah, yeah,

that's job bone that. It would be such a strong blast of sonic energy, I think it would destroy Echo in the process. It would just explode, right if it's being emitted from echoes like face I assume, or like it's a little bits. Yeah, they used they used the mel in their head as like an echo chamber to help with the acoustics of these clicks. They would explode its head. Yes, I do think it would take some area of effect damage there, a little bit of friendly fire.

So instead of echo exploding his head with this mystery sonar, I think we need a parasitic tongue is a pod One of my favorite parasites. Oh I don't like where you're going with this. Oh no, the simoo exegua. It's also called a parasitic tongue louse. We've actually talked about this little lady on the show before. Have you heard of this beautiful, beautiful tongue parasite I have, and is probably one of the most gut wrenching things to ever

think about. This is the creature that essentially replaces the tongue of its uh it's victim. Yes, exactly exactly. So I feel like at this point I'm feeling really bad for this pot like it can keep, it can keep my friends. I'm not willing these extreme measures. The torture this thing it's subjecting her to like and then it's slowly devours her eyes and then it replaces their tongue. This is psychological intimidation. The aliens are just going to

pack up and leave Earth. It's like, well, you've got tongue parasites down here, never mind keep stinking dolphins. Jesus. Yeah, so uh see, eggs or exigua have so much trouble with that name. The tongue mouse, uh will enter the gills of a fish and swam up to its tongue and cut off the blood supply to the tongue while sucking on that sweet sweet fish blood tongue for its

own self. And once it has consumed enough of the fish's blood, it will attach itself to the stub of the tongue because as it sucks the blood from the tongue, tongue atrophies and withers and falls off, which is fun, fun visual. And these little isopods, I mean imagine like a pale, white, giant version of one of those little roly polly's. That's what they look like. Kind of horrible.

And when you open up one of these fishes mouth that has this is infected with this parasite, you just see like this little parasite face staring out like the little alien tongue in aliens like oh how yeah, sou She will live there, feeding off of the fish's blood, and sometimes the fish is mucus. She's not picky and acts as the fish is replacement tongue, because the fish literally has no choice. If it's gonna eat, it's got

to use this isopod as its tongue. And once she is ready to release her brood pouch, she abandons fish and the fish actually dies without this parasite because it now has zero tongue. You know, so you're saying is actually better than nothing, it's better than that does kind of help. It's pour victim out at least a little bit. It's better not to get it in the first place.

But you're screwed once it leaves the host, and it will inevitably leave you to lay its eggs, which you know, it's just kind of it's kind of cruel to like take someone's tongue and be like, I'm your tongue now, and then when you finally get used to it, it's like, well see it, it's like, but you're my tongue, not anymore. I'm not. By the reason I keep saying, she is, Actually it is the female pod that does this, and

it's got a really interesting life cycle. So they all start out as males and enter into the fish gills where they'll feed off blood supply near the gills. But if a second uh see x segua enters into the gills, the first one transforms from being male into being female, and uh, they mate, and then the male you know, just I think, leaves and then the newly transformed female goes up and bites on the tongue and does that cool magic trick with the fish tongue that I'm talking about.

So real, interesting little creature, absolutely horrifying to anything in the ocean that has a tongue. So yeah, that would

be my plans for the Vortex Queen's tongue. Uh. And then all you need to do if she's not freaked out enough that she just leaves Earth, because it's so horribly messed up, much more messed up than anything she could come up with as this like alien Queen, you do need to attack her school And this is maybe my favorite one, which I can't I can't wait to hear how you're gonna Well, look, so the Vortex Queen is a deep sea creature. She's adapted to the crushing

depths of the ocean floor. So she can't have a solid, hard skull filled with gooey brain like humans do, because it would collapse from the massive pressure of the bottom of the ocean to equalize. So if we went down, yeah, we went down to the bottom of the ocean, are heads would collapse a little bit. Yeah, they'd be squished. It might not look like it wouldn't look like your whole face got squished in, but your skull would definitely crack and start letting in water to equalize the pressure,

which is bad for your brain. Yeah, this kills the person. Kills the person. Uh. So to survive the crushing depths of the ocean floor, animals who have evolved down there actually often have gaps in their skull uh to help

equalize that pressure. So to illustrate this using like balls, like if you took a ping pong ball and somehow shoved it down in the bottom of the ocean, it would collapse because the huge p s I force of all of that stacks and stacks of water would be trying to equalize the pressure from inside the ball, which is filled with air which is less dense, and so it crushes the ping pong ball that's like your human skull.

Maybe not quite because our Unless you're total air head, literally filled with air, it would have such a dramatic effect. But if you drop a whiffle ball, which has a bunch of holes in it, down to the bottom of the ocean, it's not going to collapse because inside the whiffle ball is just more water, and so the density of water is equal to the density of other waters, so there's no pressure to have to equalize, so whiffleball doesn't. So if you have the actual material itself doesn't get

impacted like the plastic of a whiffleball. Yeah, just to hens on the material. So if you have a porous material like styrofoam, that actually gets crushed because all of the air inside the styrofoam gets squeezed, and so you can actually take a styrofoam cup, put it down in the bottom of the ocean, it comes back a little tiny minicup. Okay, all right. So the material has to be like super solid, rigid, no pockets of air inside.

Plastic that does not have air pockets, and I think it's sturdy enough to survive the bottom of the ocean. Bones sometimes may not be because bone is more porous, so that might get more pressure. And in fact, with these deep sea animals, they often have cartilage instead of hard bone, so that they can move around and the pressure may kind of bend their bones a little bit and push inwards, but they're not as brittle as a sort of calcified bone, so that they're just much more

durable to that underwater pressure. So what I'm saying is the vortex Queen's skull has to be made at least partially out of cartilage, and it's got to have gaps in it. And so that means that these like ramming attacks that you do in the echo the dolphin game to like crush her skull, I don't think would be very effective because it's like, dude, I'm already getting you know, all of these these this pressure from the deep sea water, Like you can't punch my skull in basically, uh, with

your your puny dolphin powers. Instead, I think we need to use a hag fish is ability to bore a hole into the soft tissue of the vortex queen skull and eat it from the inside out. So hag fish that hag fish, well, they don't specifically look for brains and typically they're looking for uh, dead or dying animals. But by the time I'm this poor vortex queen has had her mouth and eyeballs taken care of. I think the hag fish would step in. That makes sense. It's

in pretty rough shape at that at that point. Hag fish have a horrifying name that matches their horrifying little bodies. They're pink, slimy, squirmy, eel like primitive fish with no vertebral column and no jaw. They can grow around twenty or fifty cimeters long, which, ah, it's too much for me. When I'm thinking about just holding one of these, like pink slime wort, they look like worms. Uh, it's very uncomfortable.

They're not worms. They are very primitive fish. So since they don't have jaws, they don't you know, no no, no eat, you know, like a regular fish. They have two plates covered in rows and rows of pointeek teeth, and they use these plates to grab and wrasp flesh off of carrion or they're sickly and dying victims. Uh. And when they've grabbed a nice piece of flesh and kind of gotten it sort of secured between these plates

of teeth. They'll often wiggle around and not like not themselves around and rip big chunks off of their target. So a group of hagfish. Have you ever wondered, like what happens when a huge whale dies in the ocean? Like where does its body go? Sometimes it washes up on the beach, But we don't have just constant littering dead whale bodies everywhere, so it has to go somewhere right right, and it goes. You get a good mix of hagfish and crabs and stuff. I I kind of

always assume there's a bunch of crabs. Crabs love a big, big cetacean body. They they'll they love a big whale body. That's that's like, that's like t g I Fridays for crabs. Um. So absolutely. The crabs are wonderful scavengers, great at breaking down decomposing bodies in the ocean. But hag fish are the unsung heroes of waste disposal. They love a dead body.

They will get all in there. You can see sometimes these ghostly corpses of a large whale and then just these hag fish darting in and out of the body as they kind of like tear out these holes and then go inside to the softer bits of the whale. So uh and they're very slimy. Hagfish slime is this really thick? It's almost like egg white texture. It's so thick and gooey, and in fact, it's so full of proteins.

Like some people, I mean have suggested we could use that as like an alternative to egg white protein, which you know, okay, yeah, just like for breakfast, just you know, like good morning, I gotta gotta milk tasty a hagfish. Yeah, I gotta milk the hagfish for its slime to make an omelet. You know, maybe it's more eco friendly. I don't know. Um that maybe our future where you just milk a hagfish for your breakfast. Uh So, I think I must look forward to what a bright future. Look.

Maybe it's delicious, you just can't judge. Uh So, Yeah, I think that if you just set a bunch of hagfish on this poor this poor vortex coin, she's she's doomed in a horrifying way. Wow wow. Yeah, but it seems like it would do it. I mean, I guess there's probably be plenty of crabs also following, and yes, all sorts of other bottom feeder parasites would be a

party down there, pour into whatever hole. This hagfish kind of like scrobe blites, like an anglerfish, sort of using his Laura's for Laura as a strobe, like yeah, by luminescent rave, let's go. Do you remember when that new Resident Evil game like Resident Evil Villages came out our village and that giant vampire lady uh, lady dimitriuscu uh just kind of took the internet by storm. Yes, I remember Twitter blowing up about that. I'm for sure bite

a day. People love a giant, tall vampire queen. I guess apparently there's a lot of simping going on on Twitter. For sure. A lot of people had crushes on her. I guess it was like because she could crush them and that, you know, that does it for people sometimes. Yep, that's the thing. That's the thing, A big, giant, deadly vampire queen like the size of a giraffe. That. I mean, Look, I'm not here to shame people for their preferences. That's

beyond me. But if that's if, that's the thing. But you know, whether or not you want to take her out on a date, she definitely wants to kill and eat you. So she is a boss in the Resident Evil game. Ah wow, that's definitely gonna get picked up

on the audio. But whatever, okay. So um uh So, if you haven't played the Resident Evil games, which maybe some of us haven't, including me, I wasn't very good at trying to hide the fact I haven't played this game as being like justin I played like the GameCube

back there is some version. I didn't play it, but I watched my brother play it back when I was a kid, and there was like a scene where one of the zombies was like slowly going up the stairs and you saw it from the zombies perspective, so you knew it was coming. I was like scared to use the stairs for a week afterwards. So spooky. Uh. And I think I've got some rain and thunder going on,

so perfect ambiance for this section, guys. Uh So, in this Resident Evil game, the giant Vampire Lady, I think it's demes Demetrius Dimitri Scouth looks like a very tall, well dressed woman and uh she was infected with a fictional parasite called the Cado parasite. So I'm gonna be trying to be really clear here because the video game the Resident Evil games deal with a lot of fictional like molds and parasites and kind of foe biology terms, and I'll try to clearly label that these are the

fictional ones. But I'm going to talk about some real molds and fungus and parasites that I think could counteract these video game ones. So the the ca Do parasite somehow mutated her into a giant lady who needs to drink blood to survive. There's some sort of sciency schmi and c explanation in the game. Doesn't really make sense, um, but I love it. I'm not criticizing it. I love it when video games are like yeah, and then here's this fungus that makes everyone vampires, like right on, uh.

And then her minions are three lovely ladies who were also uh surgically implanted with the cad parasite. Again fake, this is all. This is all fictional parasites which somehow merged their DNA with a swarm of blowflies so they can like separate into swarms of blowflies and then coalesced back into ladies, which you know, it's pretty cool. It's a cool it's cool powers I like, definitely useful. Yeah, um, especially if you got if you're there's like some doggy

dudo in your house, it's like, don't worry, we'll get it. Boom, it's gone. Yeah, they can make short work of that for sure. So the Resident Evil series in general often combines folklore like vampires and werewolves with a sort of fake biology, like the cause of some freaky powers or mutations UH is caused by something known as the mold, which is a fictional fungus that can somehow store genetic information and cause specific hallucinations as well as mutations to

create horrible monsters. So this isn't really biologically feasible. But let's fight the weird fantasy fungus with weird real life fungus. So I think this whole castle of weird fungal uh Lady vampires could have been taken out by a smart mycologists. So my cologist is someone who studies fungus, and there are let's fight. Let's fight fungus with fungus. What do you say? Okay, sure, I can't say I'm super well versed in mycology. I mean, I relied a lot on

you know, my collogey monthly for this research. Excellent, I respect it. Most of what I know about fungus is like pretty much just the Court accepts fungus, which is yes, the kind that controls insect brains, Yes, and the and the basis for the video game The Last of Us Yes, because in that gamer or fungal as well, that is

one of my favorite of the parasitic fungus. Uh. It's so Actually, those kinds of fungus that will eat insects and be parasites on an insect are called intomo pathogenic fungus. Is intomo Let me try that one more time. Intemo pathogenic fungus. There you go, like entomology meaning insect and

pathogenic exactly. The Court accepts are one of many species of fungus that kills and eats insects by attaching to the insects body is spores uh, and then germinating and colonizing under the insects cuticle, which is that exoskeletal structure that functions as their skin. So often these intomo pathogenic fungi will use enzymes to bore holes into the insects body and then grow throughout the body. Cavity chemical warfare. Now exactly how we're going to beat the chemicals? Sweet

all right, bring us home entomopathogenic, let's get there. Sometimes you will see like insects barely managing to crawl around where half of them have been eaten by some kind of fungus. Usually it'll be like a white or gray fuzzy mold. It's so creepy. So, like you mentioned, corticepts can infect ant brains and cause them to climb up tree branches, like dig into the branch with their mannibles to get a nice secure hold before they die in spectacular fashion as a fruiting body of the fungus just

explodes from their head. So we've got a lot of really interesting species of intomopathogenic fungi, but we want one that will be really bad for blowflies, right, because we've got these two her minions, the lady demitriuscus minions turn into a swarm of blowflies, which is hard to stab with a knife. It's hard to find, so it presents a unique weakness you can exploit that interesting. I would have not thought about using kind of turning it's it's

special ability against itself. Yes, we exactly so. Uh. The there's this species of antimo pathogenic fungi called Bavaria best siena, which is a beautiful name. I feel like it like sounds sounds like one of these names from resident evil to me, like lady dimitriscu. And it's like the Bavaria best siana fungus. Uh coming in to a right, I mean, who knows. Maybe that's how they got their names. Right. If you look up the demitrisu fungus, maybe that's a thing.

Who knows. Uh. So this fungus, with its beautiful name, is very dangerous to blow flies. It is so efficient at killing blow flies and other species of flies and pests. It is often used as a biological pest decide so it grows throughout the insect, leaving behind a hollowed out carcass covered in white mold, which often collects and spills out at the joints if not completely overwhelming the carcass

of the insects. So I have included a picture of a blowfly that looks like it's just covered in white fluff. I see it looks like it like it's covered in snow or something just went it like tumbled down a mountain right like in a cartoon, exactly exactly. But no, that is white mold that has completely subsumed and devoured this poor little blowfly. I think this fungus would make quick work of the minions, and so onto killing lady DIMITRISKI herself. Uh. So I looked up on another fan

wicky thing because I have not played these games. I'm a fake nerd um, I just don't. I haven't played a game either. I simply do not have a PS five or whatever you would need for these games. PS five is pretty hard to come by, so I don't blame you. So uh. The fictional Cado parasite is a parasitic nematode spliced with this mysterious powerful mold that causes

all these human mutations in the resident evil world. So, while the game version of the parasitic parasitic nematode isn't necessarily that accurate in terms of like, you can't really just splice its DNA with mold, I don't. It's two different kingdoms, guys, different Yeah, but there are real life parasitic nematodes and of worse, there are real life predators of Nema toads, and some of those predators are mushrooms.

It all comes back to mushrooms. So in the Resident Evil Game, to defeat the big bad Lady Demese Demitrius, I cannot pronounce them. Uh is it Demitrius? Is it French? It seems like it would be French, but I have never studied French. Time not going to attempt it. I mean it takes place in Eastern Europe, but I don't know. I did take Russian, but it doesn't look like a Russian name to me. It doesn't. There's not enough conflicting

consonants in it. So uh you. But to defeat her you need a specific dagger imbued with monster killing toxins that are never specified. But hey, if you lose this dagger or butter fingers and drop it, then you're screwed. Um, Except maybe you could just go out and forage for some nice oyster mushrooms. So, oyster mushrooms make a nice meal for humans, but they like to feed on nematodes, so it seems a little weird for something like a

fungus to be a carnivore. But they absolutely can be so. Uh. They will use droplets of toxins that paralyze the nematode, then slowly digest them using the hyphe which are these branching filaments that take in nutrients for the fungus. So they're kind of like plant roots. They're not so fungus fungi are not plants. They don't have the same kinds of structure as that plants do, but these hyphe do function a little bit like roots because they will suck

in nutrients for the fungus. Yeah, how does it find these nematodes? You can live in the They live in the soil where these mushrooms are so okay, So they're just so ubiquitous that exactly. But if that doesn't sound powerful enough, like if you throw some oyster mushrooms at or make or eat some, like you don't think that's gonna work. Uh. There's a lot of different mushrooms that are in line to kill nemat toads, and they have

some really dastardly methods of doing so. Sometimes they will have booby trapped fungal spores that will develop spikes and lodge themselves in the throats of nematodes, killing them and devouring them as they germinate. So the nematotal eat this a little spore if they think it's delicious, and then it just like starts to like grow out these hypha into the nematod's throat and just devours it completely. There's also you could gift a lady Dimitrius schou with a

necklace of giant our throw bought Tyrus. So our throw Botyrus is uh perfect for killing a vampiric nematode mutant with a sense of fashion because our throw but Tyrus uses fungal spores shaped like necklaces that ensnare nematodes and shoots spikes into the nematodes body as it grows into it and devours them. So you've got options, is what I'm saying. Wow. Yeah, so we have chemical warfare, we have these booby traps, we have so many these These

fungus are definitely equipped to do some damage for sure. Yeah, in the game, you have this mysterious mold that gives them all these powers. It's like, well, guys, there's like more than one species of mold out there. There are many fungi um they're ready to party, so, you know, mutually assured fungus destruction that could definitely take out some of these vampire queens. I don't know, what do you think?

Do you think these animals could indeed defeat these video game bosses or which of these bosses do you think would actually come out on top. Bowser is definitely, like I would say, fairly evenly mashed with the crocodile. Yeah, he's got a chance. He's so spicy. Yeah, there's a lot of ways Bossle can deal damage. But I think if the crocodile is playing his cards right, um, it could certainly get a good strike on Bowser's weak point or one of its limbs. Yeah, but it's a fair Yeah,

it is Bowler's bigger. Yeah, but nobody's situation potentially not um for the deep Sea Vortex boss Vortex Queen, is that what we're called? Um? That thing is just in for a world of hurt. If what you're doing is is going to come to pass, If these parasites actually can do what you said to the alien creature, I would not want to be that. I think it has no chance. I feel like it would just be psyched out after the first attack. Yeah, if I was, if I was the vortex queen, I'd be like, I'll find

another planet. It's fine, you can keep her. Keep parasites to yourself, dolphins and your weird eyeball parasites exactly. Um. As for vampire lady, I think if you can get the fungus to be the vampire, and you certainly got got a shot, right yeah. Um, but considering they're not motile, ah, I think you need a good mess of delivering me fungal based toxins, and and you got to put them in a salad, you know, a nice salad and be like here sad. I know you drink blood primarily, but

you know it's good to get some fiber. Very true, very true. I would not curious to see how that affects their digestive tract. These verifires, do failfires need fiber? I don't know. I wouldn't want to have no fiber in my diet. So yeah, and blood sounds like it doesn't have much, so I don't think so. No, it would be tough. Well, I think that's gonna do it. For video game bosses, I think, honestly, they're going to

have a tough, tough time against these animals. But before we go, I do want to reveal the answer to last week's guess Who's talking Mystery animals sound game. So every week I play a mystery animal sound at the end of the episode and you all try to guess what is making that sound. Um, And so the hint for last week was that this may sound like a machine gun, but unless you're an insect, the only thing you'll really have to worry about is getting smacked in

the face by its enormous beautiful tail. To me, that sounds like a like a blaster from like a video game. Like, what do you think is making that sound? I think it's got to be some sort of like mocking bird or maybe a parrot, some sort of really really good mimic of sounds my experience tend to be birds. Well, that is a great guess because the answer is that this is the mating call of a brown sickle bill, which is a beautiful bird of paradise found in New Guinea.

Females have a rusty red head and a black body, whereas males have bright blue spots on their backs and white underbellies and super long ornamental tails. That are gorgeous and they are just such a fancy looking bird to

be making like machine gun noises. I find the difference in their overall appearance OF's like, oh, it's a beautiful bird of paradise, and then just like interesting, it's just out of nowhere, like how did they think of that sound to rig Congratulations to the first three listeners to give correctly, Abby, m Ana l A, and Jesse a Ska. Great job you guys. I feel like you guys are better at this game than I would be if I was playing on the other end. So really, great job

you guys. I have such smart listeners. Now onto our next mystery animal sound for next week. The hint is that it sounds like a collaboration between a biologist, a heavy metal band, and a hairdresser. So do you have any guesses for what this mystery animal is? I mean, I want to say it's a bird again. It sounds like, I don't know, a parrot. It's like a really angry parrot. My grandma had a parrot and it was always making super weird loud noises. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm gonna go

with some sort of parrot or some kind of angry parrot. Well, the answer will be revealed next week if you tune in today Creature Feature. That's how I get you, all right, I'll be there, I gotta know. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Patch so welcome, thanks for having me. The tears Zoo YouTube channel is absolutely amazing, really wonderful, um way to learn about some evolutionary biology and feel like you're playing a video game. I'm so

glad you like it. Other than the YouTube channel, where can people find you? Yeah, so YouTube dot com, slash teer zoo. But you can also find me on Twitter at at at tears zoo. Um. I'm also I also have a few things on TikTok Instagram if you just search cheers and you should be able to find them. But that's about it. That's uh the extent of my online presence. I think, I mean, I think it's pretty

good to do it. Yeah, um, And you can find if you want to write in what you think the answer is to the Mr Nial sound or any of your questions or comments or concerns, you can write at Creature feature Pod at gmail dot com, Creature Feature Pod on Instagram, or Creature feet Pod on Twitter, that's f E t E eteen Town is something very different and uh, thank you so much for listening. If you want to rate or review the podcast, I read all the reviews

and they bring so much joy to my heart. Ah and thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song Exo. Aluminate Creature features a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or Hey guess what? Where have you listen to your favorite shows? See you next Wednesday.